Quote:
Originally Posted by
monkeymania 
I suppose it is off topic -- but I'd be interested in hearing about it. I'm pretty new to all this -- just built my first HTPC, currently tunerless (hence the DCR-2650 preorder).
FWIW, even if the Ceton is a better price for 4 tuners, I personally didn't want to add heat / power to my HTPC. I am only considering external.
I have a Moxi, I had a TiVo Premier, and I also have a WMC computer. Of the three, the WMC box is my favorite by far, but it does have some problems.
I use my WMC computer with a mouse, perhaps my problems would be mitigated by using a remote... I don't know.
When you record a show and click on it there are three options: Play (makes sense), Delete (also makes sense), and Cancel Series (which confuses me - this option is probably only used once in a blue moon (compared to playing and deleting shows) so why have it so prominently displayed?). When you've watched part of the show the options change to: Resume, Restart, and Delete. The problem I have here is that the position of Delete is moved from #2 to #1. I have accidentally clicked Resume instead of Delete several times because I "aim" the cursor based on position instead of what the word actually says. Some people might say "well, just read what it says and you won't have this problem". That's fine and all, but consistency would also solve the problem without introducing any additional problems.
Sometimes the UI displays the wrong information. Once after deleting several episodes of the same show I noticed that the counter (that displays how many shows you have) didn't change. Not a biggie, but odd and a sign of poor programming in my opinion. Once, when I had my shows sorted by record date a show that was recorded on Friday was listed under Tuesday.
I don't like the way the play controls are displayed. When you bring the mouse over the video window the play controls appear. That's fine, except when you take the mouse away the controls continue to display for ~5 seconds. Not a long time or anything, but sometimes the play controls cover up something you are trying to see on the screen. If you rewind to recheck something sometimes you have to wait the 5 seconds for the controls to disappear before you can actually see what is below them.
The player doesn't use the same keyboard shortcuts as virtually every other media player out there. The space bar does not pause, the up and down arrow keys do not change the volume, and the left and right arrow keys do not fast forward/rewind/skip playback. Also the keyboard shortcut "Ctrl + T" switches to "live" TV - so, sometimes I end up switching to live TV when I try to open a new tab in my browser because I inadvertently had the WMC window "on top".
You can sort the recorded shows by both date recorded and by title (there are a couple other options as well). This is great, exactly as it should be. My problem is: say I'm looking through my list sorted by date recorded and I decide to watch Jeopardy. If I click the first Jeopardy I see there isn't an easy way to ensure I'm watching the oldest episode. The only option is to sort the whole list by title, find Jeopardy again, then go through that list to find the oldest episode. There should be a "view all recorded episodes" button, but there isn't.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I haven't found an easy way to delete all episodes of a show. Say I buy the Breaking Bad series on Blu-ray and want to clear the episodes off my computer. To do that I'd have to open the Breaking Bad list, right click on every episode, choose delete, then click "Yes" on the confirmation dialog. What a needless pain in the ass!
It seems to want to continue using the same tuner it's already using instead of simply using another tuner. I record both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. WMC will only use ONE of my four tuners to watch both shows. This is stupid because that means the "Moment of Zen" is routinely cut off at the end of The Daily Show recording AND cut off at the beginning of The Colbert recording. A workaround for this problem is to set the show to stop recording "5 minutes" after. 5 minutes is the shortest option to over-record which seems excessive when 1 minute would work perfectly.
There isn't an option to start recordings early. You can
end recordings late, but not start them early... dumb.
There doesn't seem to be a slow-mo' option or any kind of frame advance/frame reverse function. This means you pretty much have to sit there and double-click the play/pause button to simulate that function. Needless to say, it doesn't work very well. This limitation wouldn't be as much of a problem if it simply had the space bar mapped to play/pause. It also wouldn't be as much of a problem if the stupid play controls would disappear more quickly. If you want to pause AND see something under the play controls AND it's only shown on screen for a frame or two you better get ready to spend the better part of a minute to do something that should take only a couple seconds if they only implemented frame skipping controls.
I have some other problems with it, but I'm tired of typing...
All these problems are fairly trivial, but they do exist none-the-less. Unfortunately, I do not anticipate Microsoft will address any of them.
Kinda sad for Tivo and Moxi that WMC is still my favorite DVR.
